I'm afraid that there's every reason to think that Vanka's letter won't reach Konstantin Makarich. After he's finished writing it, Vanka puts the letter into an envelope, and on that envelope he writes, "To Grandfather in the village," and then, for good measure, adds, "To Konstantin Makarich."

But which village? And which Konstantin Makarich? There must have been millions of villages in Russia at that time, not to mention a fair few Konstantin Makarichs. Even if the drunken drivers of the mail coaches don't have any accidents along the way, they'll still be hard-pressed to locate the addressee of Vanka's letter given the sketchy information he's provided on the envelope.

What this whole sorry episode illustrates is how incredibly naive young Vanka is about the ways of the world. His life so far—first as a a young boy living on a farm, and now as an apprentice in Moscow—has sheltered him from the outside world. Poor young Vanka is so naive that he doesn't even know how to address a letter properly. All he knows is that he's miserable in his current condition and desperately wants to go back to the happy life he once enjoyed with Konstantin Makarich. But as no one's ever shown him how to write the correct address on a letter, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.